THE HOLOCAUST: REFLECTIONS FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF ASIAN LIBERATION THEOLOGY

The trauma caused by the systematic slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis, 1933-45, was indelibly branded on the Jewish collective psyche. During the half century that separates us from the Holocaust (Sho'ah or Churban), it has provoked a veritable avalanche of writings by both Jewish and Christian thinkers exploring its implications for their faith and practice. As Franklin Littell has argued, the Holocaust is as much a central event in Christian history as in Jewish history.

Within the sphere of Christian theology, liberation theology, which has by now moved beyond its original Latin American context and its Catholic home to grow deep roots in other continents and in different ecclesial soils, can no doubt be regarded as the most influential and challenging development in modern theology. Yet, curiously enough, Johann Baptist Metz's dictum, whose anti-bourgeois political theology has exerted a significant influence on liberation theology, that no future theological construction be unaffected by Auschwitz, seems to have had no effect on liberation theology. No Latin American Christian liberation theologian has so far dealt extensively with the Holocaust as a theological theme, much less consciously shaped his or her theology in the light of the Holocaust itself. This observation is no less true of Asian liberation theologians. By contrast, some Jewish theologians such as Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Marc Ellis have attempted to bring insights of liberation theology to bear on their understanding of Judaism and the state of Israel.

In this essay an attempt will be made first to unmask vestiges of anti-Judaism in some representative writings by Asian theologians; their anti-Judaism is all the more pernicious as it is mostly unconscious. Secondly, resources of Asian liberation theology will be harnessed to address some of the issues raised by the Holocaust and Holocaust theology. Finally, some suggestions will be made to further the conversation between Asian liberation theology and contemporary Christian theology of Judaism.

JEWS AND JUDAISM IN ASIAN THEOLOGY

Historical records show that Jews had been present in East Asia when Christians moved out of the borders of the Roman empire, from West Asia into East Asia. If the Acts of Thomas can be trusted, the first convert of St. Thomas, "the Apostle to India," was a little Jewish flute girl at the court of the Indian king Gundaphar. In Asia as elsewhere, the Jewish communities of the Second Diaspora were often the first focus of Christian evangelism. According to The Doctrine of Addai, written between 390 and 430, the missionary Addai, reputedly St. Thomas's disciple, when he first came to Edessa, the capital of the tiny kingdom of Osrhoene, first sought out the Jewish community, lodging with "Tobias the son of Tobias." According to the same document, one the four groups of people who accepted Addai's teaching, besides the nobility and members of the royal family of Osrhoene, pagan religious leaders, and the common people, were Jews "skilled in the law and prophets, who traded in silk."

When Matteo Ricci arrived in China, he found a colony of Jews in Kaifeng, but no Christians. In 1595 he found pockets of Christians ("five or six families") in Nanjing and elsewhere in central China who seemed to have lost all their earlier beliefs, making their churches into temples and in many cases even converting to Islam. The only traces of the Christian faith among them were their rudimentary knowledge of the psalter and the sign of the cross which they made over their foods. In 1602 Ricci was informed that in the northwestern regions of China, in the old kingdom of Xixia, there were "certain white men with flowing beards who had churches with bell towers, ate pork, worshiped Mary and Isa (as they called Christ our Lord) and adored the Cross."

In Beijing, in the summer of 1608, Ricci received a visit from a Chinese Jew by the name of Ai Tian who had come to the capital to take the examinations for the doctoral degree. Assuming that Ricci was a Jew, Ai Tian told him that there were in his hometown ten or twelve families of Jews and a magnificent synagogue, which only recently they had renovated at the cost of ten thousand gold pieces, and that there was an even larger Jewish community in Hangzhou. Ricci was also told that in Kaifeng there were certain strangers whose ancestors came from abroad and who observed the religious custom of venerating a cross. About three years later Ricci despatched a Jesuit Chinese lay brother to Kaifeng to verify his visitor's report about the presumed Christians. The brother confirmed the accuracy of the Jewish informant but said that these Christians, perhaps for fear of persecution, were reluctant to admit to being Christian.

From his conversations with Chinese scholars, Ricci discovered that the Chinese word huihui referred not only to Muslims but also to scattered communities of Jews ("the huihui who reject the sinews" -- a reference to Jacob's wrestling with the angel) as well as to the descendants of the Nestorian Christians ("the huihui of the cross"). A great stone discovered in 1623 at Xian, the ancient T'ang-dynasty capital Chang'an, with the inscription "A Monument Commemorating the Propagation of the Ta-ch'in (Syrian) Luminous Religion in China" speaks of the arrival of a Nestorian missionary in the Chinese capital in 635. The missionary's name was Alopen; he came carrying "the true Sutras" with him and was requested by King T'ai-tsung to translate the scripture into Chinese. With funds from the king's own treasury the first Christian church was built in China in 638.

That the same word huihui was used during the Ming dynasty to refer to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike implies that in the Chinese eyes these three Western religions with their belief in the one God were basically the same. It may also indicate that the relationships among the followers of these three related religions in China, in contrast to the long history of mutual hatred in Europe, had been amicable, so that the Chinese did not have any reason to regard them as possessing separate or rival identities. Indeed, when the emperor Wanli saw the full-length portraits of the Jesuits in Beijing, he looked at them for a moment and pronounced: "They are huihui."

That relationships between Jews and Christians in China during Ricci's time were friendly is testified by the fact that when the lay brother was sent a second time to Kaifeng, this time to visit the head of the synagogue, with a letter from Ricci stating that he had at his house in Beijing all the books of the Old Testament as well as those of the New Testament, the rabbi gave the brother a very warm welcome. But he took exception to Ricci's affirmation that the Messiah has already come, saying that the Messiah would not come for another ten thousand years. Despite this difference of opinion, however, the head of the synagogue added that given Ricci's reputation and learning, he would confer upon Ricci the dignity of high priest of the synagogue, if he would join the Jewish faith and abstain from eating pork. Later, three other Jews, one of whom was the nephew of the first visitor, came from the same city to Beijing and were warmly received by the Jesuits. All three eventually decided to receive baptism after being convinced that the Messiah had come in Jesus.

It is significant that Ricci, despite the fact that he had had first-hand experiences of Christians' hostility toward Jews, first in his hometown Macerata, then in Rome and in Goa, refrained from polemic with the Jews. In his famous "catechism," The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, Ricci does not make any disparaging remark about the Jews.

By contrast, anti-Judaism is unfortunately pronounced in a later influential catechism. When Alexandre de Rhodes, the Jesuit "apostle to Vietnam," wrote his Cathechismus pro iis, qui volunt suscipere Baptismum, in Octo dies divisus, he transmitted to the East much of the centuries-long anti-Judaic heritage of Christian theology. Speaking of Jesus' performing of miracles, de Rhodes paints a very dark portrait of the scribes and Pharisees, highlighting their jealousy and hatred of Jesus: "Among the Jews the Lord had many and very skillful enemies, because their works were evil. These were called Scribae and Pharisaei.... Many powerful people hated the light the Lord projected in the holiness of his life as well as in his admirable doctrine because they were charged with various sins. As a result, people venerated him and abandoned the Pharisaei to follow him. This increased the jealousy of the Scribae and Pharisaei who sought to destroy the Lord's reputation in front of people by means of calumnies under the guise of piety and religion."

After relating Jesus' healing of the man born blind, de Rhodes comments on the pride and spiritual blindness of the Pharisees: "Those who in their pride rely on their own wisdom and refuse to accept the Word of God, will fall into many sins; they become blind and finally fall into the precipice of eternal death. Thus, the Pharisaei, impious and proud they were, refusing to accept the light of the Lord Jesus manifested by so many miracles, became blind and finally fell into the ruin of eternal damnation." At the end of the sixth catechetical day, de Rhodes urges his catechumens to embrace the Christian faith by rejecting the "hard-heartedness of the Jews": "Let us detest the hard-heartedness of the Jews, let us adore the Lord, and let us embrace ardently in our minds his divine teaching in order to be enlightened now, and to obtain eternal life later."

In his narrative of Jesus' passion, de Rhodes repeatedly refers to "the Jews" as accomplices in the killing of Jesus and affirms that the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans was God's punishment for this crime: "Because this crime of the Jews was the most atrocious since the creation of the world, it should not pass without receiving even in this life its punishment." As evidence of the severity of divine punishment, he cites Flavius Josephus's "incredible and horrible story of a [Jewish] hungry mother who was suckling her child; she killed it with her own hands, cooked it, and ate it." De Rhodes repeats the common view among Christians that all the calamities that happened to the Jews during the siege and destruction of Jerusalem were "divine vengeance against the evil Jews," whereas those who had accepted the Christian faith could escape them.

It goes without saying that de Rhodes's remarks about the Jews and the Pharisees, blameworthy as they are, do not necessarily reflect a conscious anti-Judaism on his part. Rather, they are inherent in Christianity's "teaching of contempt" against Jews which he inherited in his theological studies in Rome. Nevertheless, they are no less lethal since they have seeped into not only catechesis in Asia but also in widespread popular devotions such as the way of the cross and the passion play.

While such a negative view of Jews and Judaism, deplorable as it is, may be excusable due to the lack of historical knowledge of the Judaism of Jesus' times in the seventeenth century, one is surprised to see the persistence of such a view in some contemporary Asian theologians. Like their Latin American counterparts, some Asian theologians tend to set in sharp contrast the difference between Jesus and his message about the kingdom of God on the one hand and various groups of Jews on the other. For example, Aloysius Pieris, an influential Sri Lankan Jesuit theologian, explains Jesus' baptism in the Jordan at the hand of John the Baptizer as a "prophetic gesture" and contrasts it starkly with other spiritualities of his time:

... I observe that Jesus was faced with several streams of traditional religiousness when he answered this prophetic call. Not every kind of religion appealed to him. From his later reactions we gather that the narrow ideology of the Zealot movement did not attract him. Nor did the sectarian puritanism of the Essenes have any impact on him. As for the Pharisaic spirituality of self-righteousness, Jesus openly ridiculed it. His confrontations with the Sadducees – the chief priests and elders – indicate that he hardly approve their aristocratic "leisure class" spirituality. Rather, it was in the ancient (Deuteronomic) tradition of prophetic asceticism represented by the Baptizer that Jesus discovered an authentic spirituality and an appropriate point of departure for his own prophetic mission. In opting for this form of liberative religiousness to the exclusion of others, which appeared enslaving, he indulged in a species of "discernment," which we Christians in Asia, confronted with a variety of ideological and religious trends, are continually invited to make.

While one may agree with Pieris's characterization of Jesus' spirituality as prophetic and liberative, one must object to his labeling the spirituality of the Zealots as "narrow ideology," that of the Essenes as "sectarian puritanism," that of the Pharisees as "self-righteousness," and that of the Sadducees as "aristocratic, ‘leisure class' spirituality." Pieris is of course within his right to contrast Jesus' spirituality with other ideal types of spirituality, but to attribute "narrow ideology,""sectarian puritanism," "self-righteousness," and "‘leisure class' spirituality" to specific historical groups and to stigmatize these spiritualities as "enslaving," especially when these groups have been maligned throughout Christian history, is, besides being historically inaccurate, to perpetuate the worst caricatures of them.

Similarly, Choan-Seng Song, a prolific Presbyterian Taiwanese theologian, has repeatedly contrasted Jesus' behavior and attitude with those of "Jewish authorities." Commenting on Job's theological struggle Song argues that "it is a struggle to be liberated from the God of the traditional religion and become free for God in God's own self." Again says Song: "Job's dialogue with his friends turns out to be not a dialogue at all. It becomes Job's struggle against the false God of religious traditions and theological orthodoxy. His real adversary is not his friends, but the false God they defend. To debunk that false God becomes his preoccupation. ‘I am ready to argue with God,' says Job with determination -- the God of my friends, the God of my religion, the God of my ancestors." The God of traditional religions is, according Song, "the God of retribution." It is true that Song's rejection of the God of retribution forms part of his critique of religion and religious traditions in general; still in this context it is the Jewish religion that is directly targeted ("the God of my friends, the God of my religion, the God of my ancestors").

Furthermore, contrasting "the God of retribution"of Judaism and of religion in general with the "Abba" of Jesus, Song highlights the distance between them, especially on the cross. Commenting on Jesus' cry: "My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?" Song argues against Jürgen Moltmann that Jesus' words do not refer to the separation between God the Father and God the Son in an alleged intra-trinitarian conflict. Rather, in Song's understanding, they express the radical opposition between "the God of retribution," "the God portrayed in the story of the flood in the Hebrew Scriptures," "the God of legalism, the God of religious absolutism, the God of theological dogmatism" on the one hand and Jesus' Abba, the God of "karuna" (compassion) on the other, the God to whom the cross of Jesus is itself "an act of shame, disgrace, and outrage committed by human beings, an act that offends and shocks the moral feelings of the human community and the heart of God, who loves Jesus and other human beings as Abba, as Parent."

This same radical opposition between Jewish religious authorities and Jesus is carried by Song into his interpretation of Jesus' trial before the Sanhedrin. Using the categories of "official" and "popular" histories, the former being "stories told by the king, the ruler, the rich and the powerful...history taught in school, recited on official occasions, and preserved in the national archives and annals," and the latter being "stories remembered and circulated by the ruled, the powerless, and the poor ... by word of mouth, passed on in handwritten copies, and preserved not in national archives and records, but in the memories of people," Song suggests that what was on trial at the Sanhedrin was "popular history," that is, the history of Jesus and his friends: "Tried with him is a host of the women and men with whom Jesus has been associated – prostitutes, tax-collectors, sinners, people who are poor, men, women, and children who are socially and religiously discriminated against." Over against this popular history stands the "official history" represented by the Sanhedrin and the Pharisee in Jesus' parable about the two men who went to the Temple to pray (Luke 18:10-14). The prayer of the Pharisee "does not radiate his own self-confidence only, however. It radiates the self-confidence of his proud tradition, the religious hierarchy, and the whole complexity of rituals and teachings. In other words, the prayer is the epitome of the entire official history." Thus concludes Song: "What we see at the supreme council of priests and teachers is the confrontation of the popular history of Jesus and the official history of the religious authorities. Much was at stake, especially on the part of the official history. It had to maintain its officiality. It had to defend its legitimacy. It had to assert its power and authority. In contrast the popular history that Jesus carried with him to the trial had no officiality to maintain; its ‘popularity,' its being of people, in itself made it more ‘official' than any other claim to officiality."

In reading Song's interpretation of Jesus' trial and death one cannot help but be powerfully moved by his passion for justice and his solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. On the other hand, with the hindsight of the Holocaust, one cannot but reject the facile way in which Song associates "the God of retribution" with the religion of Job's ancestors in contrast to the Abba of compassion of Jesus, and the way in which he associates the oppressive "official history" with the Sanhedrin and Jewish religious authorities in contrast to the liberating "popular history" of Jesus and his marginalized people. As with Pieris, Song is within his right to contrast Jesus' understanding of God and behavior with other ideal types of understanding of God and behavior. But he runs the terrible risk of perpetuating the injustice, perpetrated throughout the history of Christianity, of stereotyping Judaism and different groups of Jews when he ascribes a legalistic concept of God to Judaism and an oppressive and hypocritical behavior to specific groups of Jews such as the Pharisees and the members of the Sanhedrin.

ASIAN LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND HOLOCAUST THEOLOGY

Despite these vestiges of mostly unintentional anti-Judaism, Asian liberation theology offers rich resources to address some of the issues confronting Holocaust theology. Stephen R. Haynes has provided a useful definition of Holocaust theology as "any sustained theological reflection for which the slaughter of six million Jews functions as a criterion, whether the Shoah displaces or merely qualifies traditional theological criteria and norms such as Scripture, tradition, reason, and religious experience." As mentioned above, to date no Asian liberation theologian has set out to develop his or her theology using the Shoah as its overarching criterion and norm. Nevertheless, a meaningful dialogue between Holocaust theology and Asian liberation theology is possible on the basis of what the latter has said about some of the issues that Holocaust theology considers pivotal. Among the many themes of Christian Holocaust theology I will concentrate on four: the concept of God, covenant, christology, and the ethics of power.

The God of Karuna: The Mute God

While Orthodox Jewish theologians have generally tended to minimize the negative impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish belief in God, most Jewish and Christian Holocaust theologians maintain that the Holocaust has shattered the traditional belief in God, that is, a God who is both infinitely good and omnipotent. Richard Rubenstein claims that the Shoah destroyed any possibility of believing in a covenantal God of history and calls for a "paganism" in which human existence is lived within the confines of the material world, without any transcendence. Emil Fackenheim is convinced that the image of God was destroyed during the Holocaust and urges a restoration of the divine image in which God's power is curtailed. For Arthur Cohen the Holocaust as the tremendum erased the conventional image of God as an interventionist in human history and attempts to fashion a new image of God in which human freedom and rationality are recognized. Irving Greenberg believes the Shoah removes the image of God as a "commanding" being in a covenantal relationship; rather, the covenant is now to be understood as a purely voluntary act which highlights human responsibility.

Catholic theologian John Pawlikowski applauded these thinkers' attempts at reconceiving the divine-human relationship after the Holocaust, especially their rejection of any simplistic belief in an interventionist God in history. But he finds them ultimately unsatisfactory because "they would appear to have left humanity too much to its own whims after the Shoah. They have not adequately explored whether God continues to play a significant role after the Shoah in the development of a moral ethos within humanity that can restrain radical evil. The role they have in fact assigned to God is not potent enough."

With their reflections on the human-divine relationship Asian liberation theologians can offer a significant contribution to the project of reconceptualizing God in a manner appropriate to our post-Holocaust time. As we have seen above, Choan-Seng Song rejects the "God of retribution" and argues for the God of compassion. Describing the compassionate God as "the speaking God" (sometimes in anger), "the listening God," and "the remembering God," Song goes on to speak of God as "the mute God." Jesus' Abba-God, who has spoken, listened, and remembered throughout Jesus' life, Song suggests, became the mute God when his Son died on the cross. More precisely, the God of Jesus was shocked into silence by grief: "The silence of Jesus' God must have been the silence of grief. God was grieved into silence. It must have been a deep grief. When grief is shallow, silence does not follow .... Shallow grief can make us talkative.... But deep grief renders us silent. It deprives us of the power of speech." Was God silent during the Holocaust, not because God had abandoned God's covenanted people or was absent from them, but because God was shocked into silence by the horror of their sufferings?

But silence, Song points out, is not necessarily a sign of weakness; it can also be a "silence of protest". Just as Jesus' silence before the religious authorities and the Roman court was a silence of protest, God's silence at the cross was a silence of protest: "God did not respond to Jesus' cry, not because God had abandoned him, but because God's horror and grief must have turned into silent protest. ‘Look!' God must have been filling the air with silent grief and protest saying, ‘What have you human beings done to Jesus, ‘my beloved Son'?" Was God not protesting with horror and grief during the Holocaust: "Look! What have you human beings, Nazis and otherwise, done to Israel, my beloved and chosen people?"

Furthermore, God's silence is not just grief and protest. For Song, it is also "a silence of pity (karuna)": "It is not just anger. It is not simply grief. It is not merely protest. It, above all, must be pity, karuna, the matrix, the womb, engaged in the creation of life and nourishment of it. In that silence of the womb, pity (karuna) struggles to empower the embryo of life for the day of fulfillment. That silence of God is like a womb enveloping Jesus on the cross, empowering him during the last moments of his life and nourishing him for the resurrection of a new life from the womb." Since the Holocaust, has God not been the God of karuna for the Jews, empowering and nourishing them, not merely for survival in a secular and militarily powerful state, but "to serve as God's People upon whom the redemption of God's world and God's own name uniquely depends."

Lastly, the God of compassion is not an "omnipotent" God. Song laments the fact that "the answer of traditional theology to this world of power is a powerful God. It invokes a powerful God and prays to an omnipotent God for intervention. Power must be counteracted with power." Rather, the God of compassion is the God who has "the power to love others and to suffer with them." Song insists that "the cross of Jesus is the cross of God. The cross people have to bear is the cross of God too. The cross of Jesus and the cross of suffering women, men, and children are linked to God and disclose the heart of the suffering God."

But Song is quick to point out that a suffering God alone is no help: " A God easily carried away by sentiments, offers no help in hell. That God would be too overwhelmed by the sight of pain and suffering to know what to do.... A tearful God may invite our sympathy but not our trust and confidence." What is needed is the God of powerful grace: "To have the will to live in hell and to see the eternal light of hope in the midst of perpetual darkness, we need God's grace, not weak grace, but strong grace, not sentimental grace, but no-nonsense grace, not fragile grace, but powerful grace. This is the grace with which God created heaven and earth." But this powerful grace, Song argues, is not available to us until in faith we become active participants in its working in history, until in faith we get involved in the struggle against the power that oppresses us. Ultimately, for Song, the God of compassion who suffers with us invites and empowers us to take up our own responsibility in freedom to liberate ourselves from those who oppress us.

In our post-Shoah time, God can no longer be an "omnipotent" God, carrying out his will without the collaboration of his creatures, totally transcendent to human history, and stranger to the suffering of people in the world. In the eyes of Asian liberation theologians, God bears the crosses of all women, men, and children. However, God does not simply suffer with those who suffer. On the contrary, if the cross of Jesus is any indication, God protests against their suffering, wants to remove it, and will vindicate those who suffer against their oppressors. But God removes suffering and vindicates the oppressed not by "intervening" from outside history, by himself, without their resources and collaboration, but with his powerful grace God calls forth and empowers those who suffer from oppression and injustice to take charge of their destiny and struggle for their liberation.

God's Covenant with All Nations and All Peoples

Intimately related to the question of God in post-Holocaust theology is the issue of election and covenant, and in connection with it, of the relationship between Israel and the church. As is well known, part of the Christian "teaching of contempt" against Jews and Judaism is the supercessionist or displacement doctrine according to which God's covenant with Israel has been abolished and replaced by God's new covenant with the church. In contemporary theology various typologies or models have been proposed to understand the nature of the relationship between Israel and the church and different categories have been put forward to express it. With regard to the covenant, questions have been raised as to the number of this covenant, and in Christian-Jewish dialogue it is now customary to classify various Christian theologies of the covenant into three types: single-covenant, double-covenant, and multi-covenant perspectives. The single-covenant view conceives of Jews and Christians as basically partners of an ongoing, integrated covenantal tradition lived out by each not so much in different contents as in different modes. In this view Gentiles can be saved only through linkage with the Jewish covenant, something made possible in and through the Christ event. The double-covenant view emphasizes the distinctiveness of each tradition but insists that both are ultimately crucial for the complete emergence of the kingdom of God. The multi-covenant perspective regards the Jewish and Christian covenants as two among an undetermined number of covenants that God makes with different religious traditions among which none can claim universality and normativity for others.

Asian liberation theologians have not directly dealt with the issue of the number of covenant(s) but their reflections on the relationship between God and Asian peoples throw a helpful light on it. Confronted with religious pluralism which is the hallmark of Asia, Asian theologians have raised the question of how God is related to them. Leading the discussion is again Choan-Seng Song. In an effort to fashion what he calls a "transpositional theology," that is, a theology that is distinctly Asian in character, he attacks what he terms the "ethno-religious centrism" of Jewish and Christian theologies. By centrism Song means the attitude of both Judaism and Christianity to take themselves exclusively as the center, norm and goal of human history. Such a view, in his judgment, leads to rigidity, homogeneity, and above all exclusivism which refuses to see God's presence and activity outside the boundaries of one's own community. Rather than election and covenant which evoke privilege and particularism and create the "us" versus "them" mentality, Song prefers the symbol of "reign of God": "The reign of God, according to Jesus, is not an institution but people – people with dignity as human beings regardless of their backgrounds and entitled to freedom and justice, people affirming their full humanity and refusing to accept the conditions that belittle that humanity." What unites Jews, Christians, and all other peoples is not a particular election by God but their common humanity and their shared struggle to defend it whenever and wherever it is threatened and oppressed. By shifting the emphasis from covenant to the reign of God Song wants to avoid the theological exclusivism that has characterized certain types of theology of religion.

This focus on the reign of God forces us, according to Song, to overcome our ethnocentric concept of God. Quoting "The People's Creed" written by a Christian from Zimbabwe with approval, Song says that God is "a color-blind God" who has created "technicolor people." Overcoming religious "centrism" also allows us to recognize "the saving activity of God in the world of nations and peoples, in the community of people of other religions as well as in the community of Christians."

This rejection of religious centrism is also espoused by some Asian feminist theologians such as Kwok Pui-lan and Chung Hyun Kyung. Aware that the bible has been used in the colonial discourse to legitimate belief of the inferiority of Asian peoples and the deficiency of Asian cultures and suspicious of the Bible's patriarchal bias, Kwok Pui-lan believes that the concept of election and hence covenant leads to exclusion of the Other. Following Cain Hope Felder she affirms that "the explicit concept of Yahweh's preference for Israel over other nations and peoples developed into a religious ideology relatively late, that is, in the period of Deuteronomic history toward the end of the seventh century B.C.E." Chung Hyun Kyung also sees a connection between the claim to a special election by God and colonialism practiced by the West upon Asia. Rather than starting from and relying on the history of the covenant of God with Israel and Christianity of which the Bible is the normative record, she urges that Asian women construct their theology on their own stories: "The text of God's revelation was, is, and will be written in our bodies and our peoples' everyday struggle for survival and liberation. God did not come first to Asian women when Western missionaries brought the Bible to Asia. God has always been with us throughout our history, long before Jesus was born. The location of God's rvelation is our life itself. Our life is our text, and the Bible and church tradition are the context which sometimes becomes the reference for our own ongoing search for God."

Asian liberation theologians generally reject the Christian supercessionist doctrine with regard to God's covenant with Israel. By the same token, they also reject the Christianity's claim to an exclusive and total possession of a new and perfect covenant with God. Rather they insist on God's no less real presence in other religions with their own scriptures and rituals and in other peoples, especially in those who are poor and suffer. Instead of focusing on a special election by and covenant with God, they regard our common humanity and our shared struggle for its liberation from all forms of oppression as the basis for constructing an understanding of our relationship with God and with each other. In this way, Asian liberation theologians broaden the perspective of the discussion among Holocaust theologians of the issue of God's election and covenant.

Christ, the Marginal Person Par Excellence

For Holocaust theology christology has become the instantia crucis. With rhetorical flourish Rosemary Radford Ruether declares that "anti-Judaism developed theologically in Christianity as the left hand of Christology. That is to say, anti-Judaism was the negative side of the Christian claim that Jesus was the Christ." Naturally, then, post-Holocaust theologians have made special efforts to reformulate a christology that is free from anti-Judaism.

Asian liberation theologians too have been busy shaping a christology that would make sense to their situation. Aloysius Pieris develops a portrait of Christ as a poor monk, Choan-Seng Song an image of Christ as the crucified people, and Chung Hyun Kyung a picture of Jesus as a suffering and liberating woman. Here I will focus the portrait of Jesus as a marginal person as developed by Jung Young Lee.

Drawing upon his experiences as an immigrant and the history of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants in the U.S., Lee defines his and their experiences as being on the margin as opposed to being at the center. By "marginality" Lee means not only being "in-between," that is, the experience of the people-on-the-margin as described by those who dwell at the center. This classical understanding of marginality is one-sided because framed by the central group, it emphasizes the negative effects of marginality such as ambivalence, excessive self-consciousness, restlessness, lack of self-confidence, pessimism, and the like. It needs to be corrected and complemented by the self-understanding of the marginalized people themselves. Marginal people, according to Lee, see themselves primarily as being "in-both." As Asian-Americans, Asian immigrants are both Asian and American. To stress "in-bothness" means first of all affirming one's racial, cultural, and religious origins. Being on the margin, however, prevents this affirmation of ethnic, cultural and religious particularity from being excessive, since the margins are where different worlds touch each other and merge into each other.

Being "in-between" and "in-both" are not mutually exclusive; both have something true to say about being an immigrant. They need to be brought together in a holistic understanding of marginality. Lee suggests that being "in-between" and "in-both" are included in being "in-beyond." To be in-between and in-both the Asian and American worlds, the immigrant must be in-beyond them. And the symbol of being in-beyond is to be a hyphenated person.

With this understanding of marginality Lee rereads the Incarnation, birth, life, death, and resurrection as stories of divine marginalization and develops a portrait of Jesus as a "new marginal person par excellence." To indicate this fact, Lee places a hyphen between Jesus and Christ: "I use a hyphenated ‘Jesus-Christ' because Jesus is the Christ, while the Christ is also Jesus. In other words, Jesus as the Christ is not enough. He is also the Christ as Jesus. Just as ‘Asian-American' means an Asian and an American. Whenever I say Jesus, I mean Jesus-Christ; whenever I say Christ, I mean Chirst-Jesus. They are inseparable, two facets of one existence." In particular, in his death and resurrection, according to Lee, Jesus becomes the new marginal person by embracing both total negation and total affirmation; Jesus becomes a new "creative core". This new creative core is the point of intersection between two worlds, between the center and the margin and creates a new world, a new circle with Jesus as the new core or center. But this new core is not another center of centrality; in fact it marginalizes the old centers of marginality and turns the margins into the new creative core. The new core will not become another center of centrality, for it remains at the margin of marginality. In this way the new creative core can reconcile the center with the margin and vice versa. Jesus as the new creative core is the perfect new marginal person, "because in him every marginal determinant is nullified, and everyone Can overcome his or her marginality. In the creative core of Jesus-Christ, racism is overcome, sexism is no longer in practice, the poor become self-sufficient, the weak find strength."

Is it not possible that in this Asian christology, in which the claim of messianic fulfillment for Jesus is relativized, and yet in which Christ is granted the status of a new creative core reconciling the margin with the center and the center with margin, Christians, who have relegated Jews to the margin of their circle, can bring Jews to their center? In this Asian christology, is not possible that Jews, who have long occupied the margin of a Christian society, can be brought into a new center, not in order to relegate other groups, be they Christians or Palestinians, to the margin of their newly-founded state but to reconcile them with themselves in the new center?

Power or Release from Han?

Millennia of oppression leave indelible scars not only on the oppressed persons' bodies but on their souls as well. To overcome this state of helplessness and to prevent it from ever recurring, the oppressed people, once liberated, will establish all kinds of institution to perpetuate the memory of their oppression. Their stories of oppression and suffering can produce even a religion sui generis. This is, according to Rabbi Michael Goldberg, what has happened to the Holocaust. There is now "the Holocaust cult": The Holocaust with its dogma of survival at any cost has replaced the Jewish faith in God and functions as "civil Judaism;" it has a cult in the observance of Yom Hashoah; it erects shrines and museums; and it has its own priesthood. In particular, the Holocaust gave birth to the state of Israel which in the eyes of some Jews and Holocaust theologians has acquired the status of an article of faith totally immune from any possible criticism.

Asia, too, has its own holocausts, in the long past as well as in recent years, from centuries of political oppression and colonialism to the "Rape of Nanjing" to the "Killing Fields." Oppressed Asian peoples, too, have perpetuated their histories of suffering to make sure that their descendants and others will not forget them and that oppression will not be repeated. Among Asian liberation theologians Korean theologians have devoted much attention to the theme of the suffering and oppression of the minjung. By minjung, a Korean word which literally means the popular mass but which is left untranslated, is meant "the oppressed, exploited and suppressed politically, economically, socially, culturally, and intellectually, like women, ethnic groups, the poor, workers and farmers, including intellectuals themselves."

According to minjung theologians, a prolonged oppression and humiliation of the Korean minjung by foreign powers such as the Chinese and the Japanese and by their own dictators have produced in them a deep sense of han. Han, another Korean word that defies exact translation and is left untranslated, literally means anger, grudge, or sad resentment. It is defined by Hyun Young Hak as "a sense of unresolved resentment against injustice suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against, a feeling of total abandonment ("Why has Thou forsaken Me?"), a feeling of acute pain and sorrow in one's guts and bowels making the whole body writhe and wiggle, and an obstinate urge to tke ‘revenge' and to right the wrong all these constitute." It is agreed by minjung theologians that Korean women constitute "the minjung of the minjung" and suffer from "the han of han."

There are two ways to deal with han. One is passively to accept and internalize it as one's fate which leads to resignation and despair. The other is to refuse it and work toward eliminating it. The process of resolving han is called dan, literally meaning cutting off. According to Kim Chi-ha, a Korean Catholic poet and activist, it takes place on both individual and collective levels. On the individual level, it requires self-denial or renunciation of material wealth and comforts. This self-denial will cut off the han from our hearts. On the collective level, han can work toward the transformation of the world by raising humans to a higher level of existence. This process, again according to Kim Chi-ha, is composed of four steps: realizing the presence of God in us and worshiping God, allowing this divine consciousness to grow in us, practicing what we believe about God, and struggling against injustice by transforming the world.

Other more traditional and less militant to remove han include rituals, drama, mask dance, and shamanism. By means of these activities the participants achieve what is called "critical transcendence" though which past han is resolved and liberation achieved.

The Holocaust has produced in the Jews a kind of han. Instead of internalizing it as their divinely ordained fate, most Jews believe it is incumbent upon them to remove it by securing power and using it against those who threaten their survival. One of the results of this effort of empowerment, together with the Zionist movement, is of course the founding of the state of Israel. But as is well known, the battered chid will often grow up into a child batterer, and the oppressed, once they have achieved power, will turn into oppressors if driven by fear and forsaking moral norms. That the state of Israel has been guilty of abusing its power, especially in its treatment of Palestinians, is doubted by few. Even ardent Holocaust theologians have been critical of certain policies of the Israeli government vis a vis the Palestinians, especially during the intifada. Furthermore, as Michael Goldberg has pointed out, the memory of the Holocaust has been used by some Jews as both a moral sword and shield – "a sword of moral criticism with which to prick the consciences of others and a shield to deflect the sting of that selfsame criticism from their own consciences." The rabbi feels obligated to remind his fellow Jews that "even victims can still sin." Marc Ellis, a Jewish liberation theologian, has called for the deabsolutization of the state of Israel and of the Holocaust in working out a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a new Jewish theology.

John Pawlikowski has persuasively argued that one of the theological challenges of the Holocaust is the question of the ethics of power. He agrees with Jewish Holocaust theologians such as Emil Fackenheim and Irving Greenberg that after the Shoah the Jews cannot rely on divine intervention in human history to protect them, even if they consider themselves a covenanted people, but must assume responsibility through the use of power for their survival. But he hastens to quote Romano Guardinit warning that we must "integrate power into life in such a way that man can employ power without forfeiting his humanity, or to surrender his humanity to power and perish."

It is here that minjung theologians' reflections on the process of resolving han will prove helpful. For, besides the struggle to bring about justice and freedom for themselves and to become subjects of their own histories, the oppressed people, according minjung theologians, must practice, not as an alternative to the social and political struggle but as a necessary complement to it, a spiritual discipline which would bind them in solidarity with other victims and thus prevent their exercise of power from becoming abusive and repressive. Such spirituality has been described as "concrete and total," "creative and flexible," "prophetic and historical," "community-oriented," "pro-life," "ecumenical, all embracing," and "cosmic, creation-centered." Ultimately, such a spirituality will lead one to recognize that oneself, a victim, has become a victimizer in one's turn and that to fully overcome injustice and suffering and to achieve freedom, one must make the painful journey from a self-absorbed obsession with one's own suffering to altruistic actions to redress injustices on behalf of one's fellow innocent sufferers, from self-righteous protestations of one's innocence to a humbling and humanizing encounter with the mysterious and free God, from a arrogant demand for satisfaction of one's rights to a grateful recognition of God's gratuitous love. Michael Lerner, in developing an approach to Jewish liberation theology, insists on the same of dynamics: "The Torah screams out to the Jews a very different message: When you go into your land, do not re-create Egypt, do not re-create a world of oppression. You do not have to do so. Your own experience as people who were oppressed may create a psychological tendency to become oppressors, but it simultaneously has created another possibility: the possibility of remembering your experience, and using that as a basis for identifying with the oppressed, and not re-creating that oppression for others in the present."

Furthermore, should this process not finally lead Jews and Christians to asking for forgiveness and granting forgiveness, and ultimately to mutual reconciliation? "The reality of the Holocaust cannot be made to go away by continuing to weigh up guilt and responsibility. Such exercises, while not completely pointless, often come close to being obscene. Rather what we and the Jew must both do is to remember. But without forgiveness we Christians are tempted simply to forget, deny, or wallow in inaction; and Jews are tempted to lose their humanity in humiliation or vengeance. But if we are forgiven we have the chance to remember and to make this terrible event part of our common history so that we can together make a different human story for the future and look forward to the day when God's reign will come and we can embrace as brother and sister."

HOLOCAUST THEOLOGY AND ASIAN LIBERATION THEOLOGY: THE CONTINUING DIALOGUE

In 1995, fifty years after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan remembered not only Japanese victims of the war but Jewish victims as well. A Holocaust museum, dedicated to the memory of 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazi, was opened in June of the same year in Fukuyama, a city near Hiroshima. Anne Frank's diary, translated into Japanese, was also exhibited in Hiroshima's Peace Park.

Less known is what has been called the Fugu Plan, Japan's top-secret plan to create an "Israel in Asia." Conceived by Japanese diplomats, industrialists, and military leaders, this scheme involved offering displaced European Jews a safe haven in Japan-controlled Manchuria. Its purpose was twofold: obtaining Jewish financial and technical resources in exchange for physical safety and improving Japan's image with the United States and the sympathy of America's most influential Jewish population. The plan was called "the Fugu Plan" because, though advantageous to Japan, if mishandled, it would backfire badly – like the blowfish, delicious but deadly if badly cooked, called fugu in Japanese. Though this plan foundered with Japan's entry into the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Italy in 1940, it saved the lives of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust as these were issued Japanese transit visas and given wartime refuge in Asia.

These two unlikely events symbolize the dialogue between Holocaust theology and Asian liberation theology. Conceived apart in different times and at different places but in the same womb, namely, the common faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they are brought together like long-lost twins in an unexpected reunion. As often happens between siblings, their relationships may not always be smooth, there may be misunderstanding and even rivalry, and sometimes ugly things are said, and in this case, by the younger against the elder.

Though dissimilar, these twin theologies have some identical genes. Both were born in the crucible of prolonged and bitter oppression and injustice. Because of their experience of innocent suffering, they are animated by a burning sense of justice. And in their struggle for liberation, both appeal to the Exodus, the founding event of both Judaism and Christianity, as the source of their empowerment. They put their faith and trust in a God who takes side with the poor and the oppressed. To galvanize people of other faiths to the same struggle for freedom and justice, they also appeal to their common humanity and dignity.

But like twins they are not only blessed with similar strengths but are also susceptible to the same diseases. In insisting upon suffering and empowerment as well as on innocence and redemption, both Holocaust theology and Asian liberation theology run the risk of romanticizing the people whose interests they serve, be they the state of Israel or the minjung or the women within the minjung, placing them beyond the realm of evil and turning them into new messiahs and idols. They run the risk of forgetting the real danger of yesterday oppressed becoming tomorrow oppressors. Furthermore, when the people they defend achieve independence and power, both theologies insist that they and their policies be judged according to the common standards of morality of the nations, opting for normalization rather than specialness, thereby losing their distinctive if not unique character as God's covenanted people, the Jews obscuring their prophetic legacy and the Asian Christians their Christian heritage vis a vis other religious communities.

Fortunately, these diseases are not fatal to these two theologies since they do possess each within itself antibodies to fight against them. However, their immunity will be much improved if in a continuing dialogue they share with each other their particular strengths and set up defenses against common dangers, just as the Japanese remembered not only their own victims of the atomic bombs but also the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and as the architects of the Fugu plans, even out of self-interest, attempted to save European Jews from the Nazi death camps.